I had a great Ask Kirsty from Sam a couple of weeks back. He’s spent a whole load of time, created a really rather nice site with heaps of unique content and a nice clean look. The problem? No real sales and a dribble of traffic! Where’s he gone wrong then?
Hi Kirsty,
At 26 years old, I’ve been working in a company for nearly 4 years, and despite getting paid a good salary, and having plenty of office banter to get me through the day, I’m not really content.
My latest site: www.LawnmowerReview.co.uk took me a good few weeks of part-time work, and has shown little signs of success. It averages about 50 visits per day, from organic Google traffic. Last month it made about £45 profit, from Adsense and affiliate commission.
Nothing to write home about, I know it’s a classic, and you no doubt get asked this question many times per week, but could you share some of your experience with me, and have any immediate suggestions on how to improve traffic to my site? are there any obvious things I am doing wrong?
I think I need to create more backlinks as a priority, could you advise me on the best way to do this?
Another problem I seem to have – is that only about 50% of my site is indexed in Google, when I type ‘site:www.lawnmowerreview.co.uk’ into the Google search field. It’s been there for a couple of months now, not sure why it’s not indexed yet.
Thanks for your time, Kirsty.
Hi Sam,
I have to say your site is a rather impressive effort with all that content and the comparison tables. I think it can do much better though, so here are some basic pointers: -
Your Indexing Issues
I’m not sure how many pages your site has. I’m seeing 113 at the moment, and I can also see you have a good sitemap linked to from every page of the site.
I think that leaves us with a couple of options as to the cause.
1 ) lack of incoming links. If you can get some decent incoming links not just to your home page, but also to your internal content pages and even your individual mower pages it will help Google to “find” your site from many different directions.
2) Site cross linkage. Google makes determinations of which pages are most relevant within a site in much the same way as it does via a search engine. If a page is linked to from many different places it must be key to the site content. If its not, then the big G-meister just can’t be assed and may not index your page!
Make Sure As Many Pages As Possible Link To Each Other…
To improve the cross linkage between all your pages, you could implement “previous” and “next” links between all the individual lawnmower pages. If you do this, make the lawnmower name the anchor text as Google will also use internal anchor text to determine what a page is actually about. i.e. if you use the anchor text “qualcast lawnmower” Google will know that’s what the page its pointing to is about and make it more likely to rank in the SERPS for that term. Simple, eh?
Your other option might be to alter your menu structure slightly so that every page has a full list of all menu items listed in the code, but use a drop down functionality so that users only see the sub menus they are interested in.
Alternatively, use both!
Improving Traffic To Your Site: Well, I must be starting to sound like a broken record to some people… the key to more traffic is generally more content targeting more search terms (and incoming links, but I’m getting to that!!).
Content, Content, Content..
If I were you I would look at your keywords at the product level. How are people searching for the lawnmower models? How could you build some additional, useful content around those search terms?
Page Titles
I also notice that your page titles are not as optimized as they could be. I would alter these and make them a wee bit stronger. i.e. here is one of your model pages: -
http://www.lawnmowerreview.co.uk/Qualcast/PowerTrak3400.html?pth=2
Currently the page title for this is “Qualcast Power-Trak 3400”
I would make it: -
“Buy Qualcast Power-Trak 3400 Lawnmower : Qualcast Lawnmower Reviews : Power Trak 3400”
That’s probably a wee bit too long for a really effective page title length, but you get the idea of how you should repeat things and include other terms around it to make as many search term combinations as you are able to in a relatively small area.
Make Better Use Of Your Traffic
You’ve not asked about this directly, but I think you should improve on page calls to action. Make the images into clickable links going through to your main merchant (the one with the cheapest price). People tend to browse pages on Auto Pilot and will often get frustrated if they don’t see links where they expect them. I would also make all the elements in your price comparison tables clickable for the same reason.
Finally, make a big text link at the bottom of your review saying something like: -
Check Out The Best Price On a Power Trak 3400>>
Possibly re-include your review table at the bottom to make your navigation out to your merchant accessible to those who scroll to the bottom of your page. Don’t miss a single sales opportunity!!
Get That Link Love Sorted…
Finally, the thorny issue of incoming links. I did a whole Ask Kirsty on this a while back, so I think I will simply round off by referring you to that!! There were some good suggestions from others in the comments of this post too, so don’t forget to read them.
Good luck, and let us all know how you get on. I reckon if you can put together a site like that, you’re pretty close to getting things right 
June 25th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Unfortunately, the lawnmower review site seems to be down but I wonder whether you would advise Sam to try some PPC.
I seem to remember you publishing some stats from your lingerie brands site which showed that around 60-70% of your traffic was derived from PPC.
Do you work on the principle of having dedicated landing pages for PPC (i.e. not linked to from anywhere on the main site) and use the full content side of the site to improve your Adwords quality score (and of course improve organic traffic) or do you send PPC traffic to one or more of the product pages in the “content site”?
I seem to have success only with dedicated landing pages.
Thanks for carrying on posting great content.
June 25th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
It doesn’t appear to have been mentioned above, but it comes up regularly in forums; isn’t it a bad idea to have the Google Adsense banner on the site?
You are basically encouraging people visiting your site to go to other sites to buy! It might be better for you to use a content widget (from affiliate window) so that people buy from YOU & you earn commission, rather than them going off your site & you earning a few pence from Adsense.
Good luck
June 25th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
@ Hadi – the index page for the lawnmower site is “forbidden” – it’s not working…however, if you visit the individual review product pages, they are working.
@ Kirsty – congrats on making a GBP45.00/month. Some affiliates make a living by making several of these mini sites.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
[...] So today, I’ll just take the easy way out and recap some of the posts I’ve discovered at the BUZZ this week that I think bring up interesting industry news or good points and tips. (There should be a blogging mantra – when you hit a wall and all else fails, just link out.) Ask Kirsty – How To Improve Traffic & Conversions On My Affiliate Site? [...]
June 29th, 2008 at 4:00 am
Excellent post! You captured them all and explained them well. A great SEO refresher and reminder.
Best,
Viqi
June 29th, 2008 at 8:56 am
As my experience grows I’m finding that deep linking produces premium results when used with incoming links. I tried this recently on a niche site I have – I wrote a few articles for ezinearticles.com and rather than linking directly to my home page I linked into my sub-sub-categories and within a week noticed that several pages became indexed in google and yahoo for terms I didn’t even research for.
@Reece
I agree with you completely. When it comes to focused niche sites, unless the adsense is placed strategically within your content, there is minimal gain to have adsense blocks placed on sidebars, headers, or footers because all it is doing is directing the traffic away from your site, when your ultimate goal should be to keep surfers on your site for a maximum amount of time.
The earnings off of adsense are minuscule compared to the potential earnings off of targeted affiliate products. Adsense in the sidebars screams “pay me please” and unless you have a site which generates 10,000 unique hits a day, the earnings are sub-par.
July 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Hey folks, thanks for the great comments!
Just a bit of feedback for you all.
I’ve since implemented some of Kirsty’s suggestions onto the site, and I’m happy to say they’ve have had an immediate impact, returning great results. Needless to say, she knows her stuff!
After improving the internal linking situation between pages on my site, Google quickly indexed the lot! now over 200 pages are appearing for the ‘site:www.LawnmoweRreview.co.uk’ query, after just days of making the change.
I’ll keep you updated with anything else that might proove useful for you guys.
Kop Khun kha Kirsty!
July 4th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Hi
I am just starting to put the ‘juice’ to work from my two and bit year old http://www.landscapejuice.com blog by trying to direct some traffic to my new affiliate site where I hope to sell lawn mowers, strimmers and lawn associated products.
I have a slight dilemma though. I use webgains as one of the affiliate companies and utilise the mow direct brand because it seems to have a greater range of products.
The problem is I get a lot of US traffic and webgains does not serve the US (unless I am reading it wrong). I thought about Amazon but their range of products is not strong enough.
Can you think of a way to convert traffic wherever it comes from and is my site optimized well enough?
Thanks in advance
Phil Voice
July 7th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Hello again Kirsty
I cannot see my comment – just my name
July 15th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Lawnmowers if a tough niche to tackle, as not all people would buy a lawnmower online as most lawnmowers now need to be sold in person as of this year all the major quality high brands have taken their lawnmowers off the internet. I realise that people are still searching for them online, I would recommend on top of Kirsty’s great suggestions registering with the garden directories – if you look there are a lot out there. I would possibly review other lawnmower brands that you do not promote, good luck with it.
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am
Finding forums about the topic area of your site is an easy way to get a little traffic to your site. But there are a few things to remember. Just posting in forums saying “Visit my site” is considered SPAM and one should not do it.